Beyond School

They pulled a fast one on me, for a very good reason, and launched the new blogs - including the education blog I’m partnering with - on Change.org.

I really, really, really beg you to come. (And I’m going to be begging some of you to guest-blog from time to time, to bridge the ed-geek world with the larger ed-world, if I can.)

If you haven’t seen change.org, you should find them interesting from the social media and participatory citizenship angles. There’s already a huge, incredible community of readers, commenters, and doers (I hope) over there.  I’m both humbled and fairly certain they meant to send the acceptance email to somebody else.

I won’t be unplugging Beyond School, as I said. Things more personal and literary-historical will stay here. Things more educational and reformist will be over at http://education.change.org.

FYI, I’ll be in Thailand interviewing with schools for the next week, then taking a long-overdue honeymoon on Ko Samui the week after that. But I’ll be back, goodness willing.

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(This post is dedicated to the aspiring writers out there.)

Today, January 1, 2009, is the second birthday of Beyond School.

What a short, strange trip it’s been.

I’m not superstitious, but I love coincidences, synchronicities, and patterns as much as the next guy. So I’m going to trace those two years up to an announcement about some ch- ch- ch- ch- changes in my writing and non-writing life that will start this week. It’s not quite the death of Beyond School, so much as maybe growing beyond it. I’m not sure. Maybe I will be by the end of this post.

In my dreamer’s twenties, I often fantasized that….

….could I but scrawl across the sky, in letters stratosphere-high and coast to coast broad, an unknown writer’s plea to the world to discover my words - with contact info at the bottom - then some patron would do so. I had no connections, no money, no idea how to manifest my potential to the world. (College essays with a red “A” across the top and encouraging scribbles on the last page did not seem like manifesting to anything larger than the usually tired hired reader at the front of the classroom.)

That was in the ’80s. It lasted into the ’90s. And I’m fully aware of how lame that dreamer was, when others with more gumption did the work to figure out the publishing game, and got published. But that was me.

Then I collided with a White Rabbit in Shanghai,

- Jeff Utecht - around the autumn of 2005, and followed him down a certain rabbit-hole, and into the wonderland of blogging. (I still hate that word.)

During the winter break of that same year, Karl Fisch, who maybe knows this, and maybe doesn’t, offered me a Fischbowl full of red pills, blue pills, new-colored pills, and I fisted them up and gulped them down. For a couple of weeks, I read everything he wrote and started having trippy visions of an education that could be. I started a blog on Live Journal, of all things, and wrote a good twenty posts in a week. (I was single then, and it was an easy pleasure.) On New Year’s Day 2006, I waved a magic mouse and zapped those posts from Live Journal to Blogspot.

I wrote and wrote and wrote for months, mostly to nobody. The  occasional comment in those days was like a gold coin from the sky. I wrote visions of world-writing wikis that would turn into blog-book “blooks” and French Revolution wikis that made my head swim. I wrote about dystopian edu-futures in which teacher-vampires “sucked classroom blogging dry,” turned it into “a new way to turn in the same old homework.” I wrote and I wrote, for nobody and everybody.

By the end of the first year, I had written - and read, oh yes, so many of you - my way into ways of teaching that were candle-flames to my moth. I’m not saying they were anywhere close to great or perfect; they were just beautiful, bright forms of inventive play that frequently drew me too close and, because they were usually too ambitious and too big, burned me out.

I’ve always agreed with whoozits the great writer who said, “It’s better to burn than to rot,” so that was okay.

A healthy schizophrenia came….

….a Nietzschean “ball of snakes” of the mind, each contending for control of this here space. I was tired of writing of Things Two Point Oh. It felt like writing about the joys of a honeymoon, long after the newness had worn off. But I was an “edublogger,” a self-taglined “kicker of addictions to 20th Century teaching.” Stuck wriggling on my pin, how could I presume to write beyond Beyond School?

But the literary snake ascended triumphant. I started writing mad long posts about Gilgamesh, touching taboos untouchable in the schoolroom (possibly only because of my own ex-Southern Baptist unconscious).  I asked students to stay and teachers to leave. I wrote ten thousand words about an epic of about ten thousand words, and only got a quarter of the way through it.

The funny thing about succumbing to that snake: it worked. More people read those Gilgamesh posts than all the rest of my 600 posts combined. It made me want to stop writing about school(iness) altogether, and just write readings of the heights of human art.

Then Sarah Palin winked up the world,

and too many seemed seduced. Another snake ascended the ball, a political one, fangs thirsting to sink venom into that catastrophic hockey-mom’s neck - for the sake of America and the world. Grandiose, yes, but aren’t all our evangelisms? I wrote about nothing but politics for the next many weeks. (And if McCain dies, goodness forbid, in the next four years, don’t make me say “I told you it was important.” That Saks Fifth Avenue demagogue would be ruling the world - including that “country” she knows as Africa.)

Fully expecting my subscribers to unsubscribe in droves, I could only hope others would come to replace them. Water seeks its own level and all of that. (And I thank all of you who stayed.)

And then one day,

after weeks of nothing but manic and stentorian political blogging, I got an email from somebody about an editing / writing position opening up. It involved educational politics and activism. “I thought of you instantly,” he said. (And I thank him, and he knows who he is.)

I applied, interviewed, interviewed again. Glacial, painful waiting (and contemporaneous with the radio job I’d also been interviewing for).

And I got the job. Stay tuned for the URL when the site is ready to launch later this week. And expect me to pull many of your sleeves to help me push that vision of an education that could be - and that, because of so many of you, already is for a few lucky students.

Have I mentioned that long ago….

….I fantasized about writing in letters as large as the sky, “I write, I write - find me”?

That was B.W. (Before Weblogs).

Now, A.W., that fantasy has become possible. Instead of scribing on the sky, we write and write  on screens of light. And if we do it long enough, hard enough - instinctively enough - we can, with the right timing and wind conditions, be found.

This isn’t crowing, mind you. I’ll still need a day job. What this is, for any who need it spelled out, is a T-E-S-T-I-M-O-N-Y of the potential of writing yourself out there. Maybe those students who never believed it when I talked myself red in the face about all of this in theory will see it now. I started Beyond School with a freshman class two years ago; I wish I had them as juniors this year.

~   ~   ~

In the future,

I’ll be writing more on my new space than here. I want to continue making time to write the Unsucky English Lectures, but am not sure if I’ll post them here, or on a new blog, and just leave Beyond School as an artifact of teaching ideas.

(I wonder what Christian Long would advise. He bowed out of Think:Lab recently, if I’m not mistaken. And my god, I just searched for his blog and it seems he deleted it. Is that true? What a loss.)

Photo:
“Escribiendo el cielo” by anikaviro

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Ben Grey’s “21st Century Confusion” post asks a simple question that I’ve often toyed with too:

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes demonstrating originality, communicating, being open and responsive, acting on creative ideas, utilizing time efficiently, accessing information, etc. are all 21st Century Skills.  I’d retort that in reality, these skills have always been in existence and of the utmost importance.  They don’t need to have the 21st Century moniker on them to make them significant.

I’ve often wondered the same thing: “What’s all this talk of ’21st century literacy’? (Ben somewhat conflates “literacy” and “skills” in his post.)  Is there anything really new here?  My comment:

The only uniquely “21st century literacies” I can think of involve the web.

Students need to be able to evaluate information on screens upon which any sage, charlatan, or idiot can publish. That’s new (sort of. Books really are open to the same range of authors).

They need to learn “online identity management,” and I would argue that’s a new literacy. New because they’re publishing themselves, and that means reading/writing/speaking/filming/photo-ing (literacy), and 21st century because privacy has never been so porous as now. They need to know how to keep Big Brother, Big Employer, and Big Google from knowing too much.

They need to learn “social reading” online. By that attempt at a cute label I mean the ability to evaluate communication acts by strangers in social networks, emails, comment threads wherever, and the whole range of places people can attempt to connect to us individually now. They need to be able to “read” a phish, for example, and a fraudster, and yes, a p&rv.

Hm. What else. Co-writing might be new. “How to participate in collaborative writing communities.” Wikipedia, for example. I know I don’t know how to do that.

Could we even go so far as to say that social networking online is itself a “new literacy”? That networking is (or may be) an essential skill for adulthood in the 21st century?

Hm. Searching. That’s new, yes? How to effectively search for good, timely information online, and do so efficiently. I know I’m still not great at that.

I’ll stop there. Thanks for the prompt. I agree the “21st c.” buzz can be as tiresome as the “2.0.” But I think the Berners-Lee Revolution has created some unique changes, just as Gutenberg’s did. Can you see any I missed?

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The comment thread on Gary Stager’s HuffPo article on the Duncan appointment wouldn’t allow this long response, so I’m posting it here.

Gary,

I’m still informing myself (and as others have noted, your links are now more of my homework), so I’m going to withhold judgment somewhat.

I will say that all the reading I’ve done so far - and I’ve been reading a lot - confirms that Duncan’s record in Chicago is far from miraculous.

But I’ve read some ‘benefit of the doubt’ types who note that Duncan’s hands may have been tied by the Daley machine. Since Duncan’s appointment is now a fait accompli, we can only hope he’ll surprise us under Obama.

I’ll also note that, a propos the tempest around gay-basher Rick Warren’s selection for the inauguration, Duncan gave strong support to a “gay-friendly” school in Chicago. (Yes, I’m aware such an idea smacks of “separate but equal,” but wrote here about why I still think it’s a good idea.) While not an educational feather, it’s still a refreshing one to see in a cabinet member’s cap.

We may as well add that Duncan is on record as condemning the lack of funding for NCLB, its stick-instead-of-carrot posture (which could be changed), and its low-cognition assessments. If he “reforms” NCLB along these lines - and yes, many more - I can think of worse outcomes.

In the end, the decisions on education under the Obama administration are Obama’s responsibility; what he said regarding HRC at State pertains to education as well: “I’ll make the decisions.”  And while I’m as nervous as the next guy over so many of his moves lately, I guess I’m holding out hope that all the recent theater is outside-the-box tactics in a longer-term strategy that will make progressives proud. His campaign - a masterpiece of proving the nay-sayers wrong - makes me think more than twice that I can unriddle his long-term plan. So maybe he is selling out or simply making stupid choices; but maybe he’s not. He’s so damn poker-faced and close to the chest, it’s beyond me to know at this point.

I also take heart in the fact that he tapped Darling-Hammond to lead his transition team, and by choosing Duncan instead of a Rhee or Klein, arguably signaled his opposition to those more extreme edubiz proponents. I also take heart in the possibility that BO is so enamored of the “cabinet of rivals” idea in the Lincoln book he’s been touting lately that his appointment of Duncan might not equal an endorsement of Duncan’s record. Again: fait accompli - I’ll cling to any shred of hope until actions in office shred it beyond clinging.

This is all a long-winded way of saying you may be right, but until we see more, you’re not yet. Let’s hope you never are

Parting shot: To me, the money quote of your article was this:  “Perhaps we need federal legislation requiring a fully qualified superintendent in every school district!”

I’ve been thinking the same thing since I began watching the Texas Board of Edu-Creationism try to jimmy Genesis into science classes and, worse yet, textbooks nationwide (Texas standards wag the national textbook industry dog: if Texas votes to deny Darwin, all the science textbooks will aim to please. I still pray somebody stateside takes on the Smart Mobs idea to protest this putsch).

So I’d revise your money quote to add Board of Education members to the list of politicians requiring expertise in education. Failing that, we’re prey to anti-primate jackasses evermore.

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Who is Arne Duncan and how will his choice as Secretary of Education affect education in the US (and, for better or worse in this hegemonic age, much of the rest of the world)? I’ve spent so many hours since the announcement reading reactions online that both my eyes and my brain cells are fried. (Enjoy the Diigo bookmarks if you’re masochistic.) All that reading will have to steep for a while before I can serve it as tea.

Until that happens, I’m going to focus on one controversy surrounding Duncan, and toss out some thoughts on it. That controversy is performance pay for teachers.

Bill Ferriter’s excellent recent post on this issue at the Tempered Radical got me thinking. I replied there,

Thinking about it a little more, this is what I can come up with so far:

We’d have to define “merit” to include the higher-order thinking skills - analysis, synthesis, evalutation/critical thinking, creativity - that the best learning projects require. This is not the opposite of the “fact-based, right/wrong, multiple choice” testing that NCLB and the College Board/AP/SAT pushes, but what you might call the upward extension of it. Mastery of facts is the beginning, not the end, of the assessment for meritorious teaching and learning.

If we start there, that means teacher merit is measured by the types of projects that are assigned in the classroom - not by the standardized testing industry - and by the performance of students who complete these projects. This further means that said teacher measurement is performed not centrally, but locally - or perhaps by boards consisting of local and central judges. (I know that “central” is vague.)

My thinking is that if teachers were rewarded for designing learning activities that measured positively against a checklist of such higher-order thinking traits - and crucially, that the measurement was based not on a single unit, but on a portfolio of all units assigned throughout the semester or year (this eliminates the dog-and-pony show liability of single principal evaluations) - then the best teachers would be rewarded with higher pay, while the worst ones would have an incentive to change their practice for the better. Teaching to the test wouldn’t be the goal any more; teaching to higher instructional standards would be.

As for what those higher instructional standards would look like, we need look no further than Linda Darling-Hammond for answers. Her presentation linked in an earlier post lays the groundwork for such guidelines.

As I commented on Will’s post about the Duncan pick,

Since Darling-Hammond led BO’s ed transition team, she may have had his ear long enough to fill it with good sense on how to reform NCLB’s assessments for the better - so that they align with better teaching-and-learning.

And I just discovered Bill Ferriter posted a follow-up to my comment, so off I go to fry a few more cells. Bill’s worth it.

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